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In his LGBTQ Nation op-ed, Frederick Clarkson looks at how Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (FRC) thinks Christians who support marriage equality are not really Christians and that religious freedom is only for those who hold to what he calls "orthodox" views. Excerpt:

It...helps to clarify that when Christian Right leaders talk about religious liberty—they often really mean theocratic religious supremacism.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, took to the airwaves after the filing of UCC’s suit to claim that the church is not really Christian, and that those who support gay rights don’t have the same rights as conservative Christians—because ‘true religious freedom’ only applies to ‘orthodox religious viewpoints.’”

Perkins’ blunt statements are a sobering reminder that theocratic factions of the U.S. Right have long sought to regain the religious and political hegemony they lost when the Constitution was ratified in the 18th century

Frederick Clarkson, senior fellow at Political Research Associates, examines a possible "ideological reorganization, or at least reconsideration, now taking place within the Christian Right" that calls for non-democratic means, possibly including martyrdom, to affect extremely conservative political change in the United States.

Clarkson begins with an essay by long-time Republican Party operative David Lane calling for religious war in the United States.

“If the American experiment with freedom is to end after 237 years,” wrote Republican campaign strategist David Lane in an essay published on a popular conservative website in 2013, “let each of us commit to brawl all the way to the end.”

Lane's essay, “Wage War to Restore a Christian Nation,” was published on World Net Daily (WND) and then removed from it. A month later, in July 2013, Lane

told conservative Iowa radio talk show host Steve Deace...that “car bombs in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Des Moines, Iowa” would be merciful punishment from God for legalized abortion and for “homosexuals praying at the Inauguration [of President Obama’s second term].”

Since those comments, Lane is a man on the move, not a piraha. As Clarkson explains, in October 2013, Lane told the Dallas Morning News about an event of the Iowa Renewal Project,

one of several state-level units of the American Renewal Project—which is, in turn, a political development and mobilization project of the Mississippi-based American Family Association. Its most prominent figures are founder Don Wildmon and the abrasive radio host Bryan Fischer. Lane [said] that the goal of the event, which featured Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and U.S. Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), was the same as the others: “the mobilization of pastors and pews to restore America to our Judeo-Christian heritage and re-establish a Christian culture.” Lane said: “We’ve been in 15 states now, largely under the radar, and we’ve had 10,000 pastors plus spouses that we’ve put up overnight and fed three meals. The purpose is to get the pastors—the shepherds in America—to engage the culture through better registration and get out the vote.”

Father C. John McCloskey, who believes that regional American strongholds of conservative Christianity may be necessary in light of the culture of religious pluralism and the constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state,

and Pastor David Whitney, 56, who leads the small Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Pasadena, MD (near Washington, D.C.).

Clarkson notes:

Taken singly, the views of [these] Christian Right leaders...would not necessarily signal a trend. But taken together, the commonalities of their views take the edge off of their many differences and reveal distinct, overlapping factions of a dynamic movement towards the ideas of nullification and secession—and the possibility of violence and revolution.

These leaders are not without influence, they are not without connections within the Republican Party, and, as Clarkson shows, they are deadly serious.

The rumblings may be faint, seemingly distant, but they absolutely must not be ignored.

Articles on Clarkson's essay have on Salon.com (article by Paul Rosenberg) and Buzzflash (an article by Bill Berkowitz).

The religious right has been freaking out about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos” for what feels like an eternity. And, while the theological complaints seem laughable for their rancor and predictability, it’s time we thought harder about what they represent, because the Christian right’s “Cosmos” agita actually indicates a far deeper problem in religious conservatism — the selective acceptance of Enlightenment values. Religious conservatives have selectively adopted the legacy of liberal Enlightenment, from free speech to science, and jettisoned it when it does not suit their narrow ideological aims.

Bruce Wilson writes about The Gathering, which provides millions of dollars to religious-right causes.

Like its familial evangelical parent The Family, The Gathering takes the coercive moral authoritarianism inherent to anti-LGBT laws being passed (aided and encouraged by The Gathering-funded groups) from Uganda to Russia, and fuses it to the radical economic libertarianism of the Koch brothers.........[The Gathering] have bankrolled, from Uganda to Russia, the mounting international war on LGBT rights; evangelical opposition to healthcare reform and action to curb climate change; the promotion of young-earth creationism and Intelligent Design; ministries training African leaders in the “biblical worldview”; legal efforts that have fought against same-sex marriage and LGBT rights in the United States, and have forced anti-gay fundamentalist bible clubs into thousands of U.S. public schools....

Its foundation heads are plaintiffs in a legal challenge to healthcare reform now before the U.S. Supreme Court and they are leading efforts to attack organized labor and defund public schools.

The colossus of The Gathering is the National Christian Foundation, which gave out an estimated $670 million dollars in grants in 2013 and has rocketed, in just two years, from spot number 34 to number 12 on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s “Philanthropy 400” list.

From Frederick Clarkson's article for Political Research Associates' Eyes Right:

There is much we can learn about the state of the Christian Right from Russell Moore, the point man on public policy for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Like other Christian Right leaders, Moore continues to rely on historical revisionism, bogus science, dubious claims of religious persecution, and hints darkly of tyrannical governmental violence to come. But his arguments in favor of discrimination quickly drift into outright absurdity......[I]t is worth recalling that Moore, as we reportedhere at Eyes Right, recently distinguished himself by featuring two controversial and ethically compromised figures at a SBC “summit” on the Gospel and sexuality: Mark Regnerus, who is best known for his thoroughly debunked study on same-sex parenting (a study bankrolled by Christian Right interests opposed to gay parenting–a fact he attempted to conceal); and Greg Belser, who has been deeply implicated in the cover-up of a notorious child sex scandal among Baptist clergy. The two appeared on a panel on homosexuality at the Summit along with Baptist pastor J.D. Greear, who sparked a stormon social media when he compared opposing marriage equality in the church to opposing slavery in the South at the beginning of the Civil War. Moore is planning an entire conference on homosexuality slated for October 2014.

[Anglican clergyman Christopher] Senyonjo's opposition to discrimination against gays has earned him the status of "an elder" in the eyes of the country's beleaguered gay community, said Pepe Julian Onziema, a prominent gay leader in Uganda who has known Senyonjo for many years. "Our relationship is one of giving support to each other. The backlash that we receive is equally the same," said Onziema, who added that Senyonjo has taken "a very courageous and brave stand."

Senyonjo said he lives off "gifts" from his children and friends after his pension was severed as "a kind of punishment" over his pro-gay activities.

"They (church leaders) cut off my pension," he said. "It is very difficult even for my family. But I know the truth and it has made me free."

Also, for more information see the documentary being released on DVD in May 2014, God Loves Uganda, an examination on the role of American evangelicals in fostering anti-gay hatemongering in Uganda. View the trailer here.

Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest and the senior religion and sexuality researcher at Boston-based Political Research Associates (PRA), which Religious Right Watch has long been appreciative of, has authored an important contribution in the Los Angeles Times. He wrote the reports "Colonizing African Values" and "Globalizing the Culture Wars."

The vitriol that has fueled U.S. culture wars for so long is now being exported, and some of our most ardent culture warriors are finding a far more receptive audience abroad.

In nations such as Uganda, Russia, Nigeria and Belize, an insidious homophobia engineered in America is taking root. I have seen this hate being spread with my own eyes.

In March 2009, while in Kampala, Uganda, researching reports of U.S. right-wing evangelical involvement in attacks on LGBTQ equality and reproductive justice, I was invited to a three-day conference on homosexuality hosted by the Family Life Network, which is based in New York. The keynote speaker was Scott Lively from Springfield, Mass., who introduced himself as a leading expert on the "international homosexual agenda." I filmed Lively over the course of two days as he instructed religious and political leaders about how gays were coming to Uganda from the West to "recruit children into homosexuality."

In other words, while it is losing a big battle (same sex marriage), the Religious Right still hasn’t lost its most important one (abortion) and on a host of other fronts (heterosexual marriage, inequality, criminal justice, religion in the public square), it is having to reconfigure in more productive ways–in ways that are more “seamless garment”, to use a Catholic expression. This is all to the good. Under a microscope, reform can look like defeat. But at the scale of history, things often end up very different.